The present disclosure relates to support devices of the mattress type or of the cushion type for supporting the body of a person sitting or lying on the support device, and in particular to support devices of the therapeutic mattress type for supporting patients' bodies. The present disclosure relates more particularly to an inflatable cell and to a method of manufacturing such an inflatable cell, the cell and the method being specifically developed for making a support device having a structure made up, at least in part, of a plurality of inflatable cells that are suitable for being inflated with a fluid, and in particular inflated with air, that are, more particularly, in the form of sausage-shaped tubes, and that are disposed transversely relative to the longitudinal direction of the mattress, side-by-side, so as to form an inflatable support layer on which a person can be recumbent and be supported under desired comfort conditions.
Support devices of this type are, in particular, used as mattresses for patient care because they make it possible, by means of a device for regulating the inflation/deflation of the cells, to distribute appropriately the interface pressures, i.e. the pressures exerted locally by each point of the body on the surface of the mattress, as a function of the morphology and of the position of the patient, and thus to avoid or to reduce the risks of decubitus ulcers or “bedsores” forming in the zones of the body that are at risk such as the zone of the sacrum and the zone of the heels, for example.
A large number of devices of this type are known and described in various forms in the state of the art. However, those support devices having structures that are inflatable, at least in part, all suffer from the drawback of being very costly to manufacture, which limits their field of use to hospitals, and indeed sometimes to only certain departments of hospitals for admitting and treating patients having very reduced mobility and/or having high risks of developing bedsores.
The cost of manufacturing such support devices is, in particular, related to manufacturing their structural elements, and in particular the inflatable cells, and also the systems for automatically inflating said cells, which systems require implementation of a large number of ducts and of valves for feeding and/or removing air so as to enable the cells to be inflated and then for their inflation pressures to be regulated.
The high cost of such support devices having inflatable cells currently rules out the use of such support devices for the vast majority of patients receiving healthcare treatment at home because public and private health insurance schemes generally refuse to pay or to reimburse the costs inherent to purchasing and using such devices.
And yet giving healthcare treatment at home is a form of healthcare treatment that is increasingly being encouraged by the very same public and private health insurance schemes because it makes it possible to reduce considerably the healthcare costs related to prolonged periods in a hospital or to repeated spells in a hospital, or even makes it possible to avoid having to admit to a hospital at all patients who can, by means of progress in medical techniques, henceforth be treated as outpatients.
There thus exists a major technical problem consisting in designing and making a support device made up of inflatable cells whose cost is low enough to be borne by patients and/or covered by their healthcare cover systems so as to enable them to be treated at home.
Such a problem requires, in particular, the cost of each of the component elements of support devices having inflatable cells to be reduced, in particular the cost of the cells themselves, and also requires the structures of such support devices to be simplified so as to facilitate assembly of them and thus so as to reduce the cost of manufacturing them.
Another problem is to provide a support device made up of inflatable cells that improve the support of the mattress and the comfort of the patient, and that are suitable for being assembled together and, when necessary, replaced individually so as to form a support device of the mattress type.